Adam and Eve started perfect, but lost absolute perfection. The Bible's Hebrew Scriptures (or Old Testament) in the book of Genesis 5:5 states that almost perfect Adam lived over nine centuries until the age of 930. This can be likened to someone who was born during the dark ages in the year 1100 living until old age today, and finally passing away almost 30 years from now.
Adam waited until he was age 130 before he and Eve had their first child, whom they named Seth. During the next eight centuries, they gave birth to other children.
The immediate ancestors were close to perfection. Their firstborn son Seth had a child earlier in life than Adam and Eve had him, bearing a son at the age of 105. Seth lived another 800 years to the age of 912. As the imperfect human genetic pool went into what I will refer to as "retrograde evolution," however, the lifespans of generations farther away from Adam and Eve dropped dramatically, as shown as you read verse by verse of Genesis chapter 5.
Bear in mind that in the first 100 years of Adam and Eve's life, it took generations that were to live thousands of years in their future enough time to go from simple aircraft travel to space travel. The scientists that were the catalyst for such changes, like Albert Einstein, likely had less than 5 percent of the mental capabilities of Adam and Eve.
Just as Adam and Eve lived over 10 times the lifespan of humans today, so their mental capacity was likely that great or even higher. If that is true then just 5 years after their creation as adult humans, they likely had the intelligence of a 50 year old human today, and probably exceeded the I.Q. of Albert Einstein. Imagine the exponential learning curve when Adam and Eve were 50 years on Earth! Using the same multiplier of 10, their intelligence could have been likened to Einsteins -- if he had lived to the age of 500!
The first son Adam and Eve conceived when Adam was 130 years of age, Seth, was likely many times "gifted" as some bright children who remarkably adapt to today's computer technology (known as "child prodigies"). The laws of physics that took Einstein his entire life to achieve, were probably innately understood scientific principles taught by Adam and Eve to young Seth, and innately understood by Seth, in the first few years of his life.
The basis of this knowledge, in a manner of a millennium, could have formed an illustrious civilization. Filled with "technological" wonders based upon natural laws of physics incomprehensible to modern humans, pre-flood civilization likely moved from Adam's original toiling in harsh fields to what we would consider a remarkable standard of living the world has never recaptured.
In that civilization lived Noah and his family. At the age of 500, Noah had three sons. (Genesis 5:32)
The quality of the human genome continued to fall, but not far enough to prevent humans to engineer dangerous technologies. Keep in mind that Noah, who lived for five centuries before having his first children, was a generation not far removed from his immediate ancestors Adam and Eve.
Noah's intelligence and mental capacity would likely have been considered so far ahead of the world's brightest geniuses today, that it's unfathomable what he could have developed as a scientist in today's laboratories. This would have explained the sea worthiness of the "Ark" with the ability to maintain stability and withstand pressures that exceeds the technologies of modern ship builders!
Noah's children who went through the global flood with him were the fathers to the children who built the tower of Babel. The Scriptures do not fully state the full extent of this "tower" and why it was stopped. However, it is revealed that a language existed that was used by the entire population of Earth before Jehovah God caused its abandonment to local languages, for the purpose of stopping the Babel project from its completion.
It is evident that the Genesis account turns Darwin's theory of evolution upsidedown. However, "reverse evolution" or retrograde evolution is compatible with modern physics theorums on entropy.
Interestingly, Darwinian evolution and entropy in modern physics are incompatible. Organization can turn to disorganization through entropy, but not the other way around. An egg can fall on the floor in the stream of time and shatter, according to the natural laws of entropy, but a smashed egg on the flood cannot reverse itself like a video tape run in reverse, reassembling itself and flying backwards onto the table, sitting on the table in its original unbroken form. A glass of milk can fall off the table and spill, due to entropy, but this sequence of events cannot reverse itself. A room can get dirty if not maintained with a vacuum cleaner, but it cannot go into a reverse time stream and return to its clean state.
In the same manner, a perfect human genome that is not "maintained" in a state of perfection will degrade. The degradation might resemble a curve that moves gradually but then becomes steeper in its decline (or moving to imperfection exponentially).
This is what I call "retrograde evolution." It is the natural entropy that occurs with all things. Without the holy spirit maintaining human genetic perfection from generation to generation, entropy will cause humans to move toward imperfection and eventually die out as a species entirely.
Derrick
[Originally posted at the link http://h2o.aimoo.com/forum/postview.cfm?id=311102&CategoryID=2967&startcat=1&ThreadID=267279 under my registered screen name CogentMinded.]
Edited by - Derrick on 10 September 2002 18:42:15